GitLab Group Conversation, 29 Jan 2021

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From YouTube: Digital Experience - Group Conversation 2021-02-02

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Presentation slides here: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1CH4in3Ac6mIiHV5eMD47Svj-iSk5tjDuZCz_zGpr2Fs/edit#slide=id.g29a70c6c35_0_68

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Hello, everybody, I'm michael price senior manager of digital experience, so this is our group conversation for february, 2nd 2021., I'm going to walk you through some work that our team has done over the last quarter, starting with our team members. So up here is a link to our handbook page. You can find work in progress of things like our team principles, how we work our sprint cycles.

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Everything that you know as a team who's come together over this quarter needs to be organized, so we have five full-time members, including myself. A group of amazing people, laura and tyler, were just added over the last month.

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We also have five contract team members. These are amazing individuals who are contract, but full-time, so really excited to have a really rounded out. Team of design system leads ux designers front end engineers and full stack devs.

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First slippers, our marketing design system, so the marketing sites needs vary from the product needs, so pajamas. The product design system, which is amazing, really focused on utility usefulness. Getting things done on the marketing side. We want to be communicating, you know, engaging and entertaining so there's a lot that we can share in terms of typography, some spacing some grid and then there's some that we can't. We just have some components. That would not make a lot of sense to be in the product, but make a lot of sense for us. So we are connected.

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You know at the root, but we have forked a little bit. So we have a figma file, which is our slippers foundation file where all the design work happens. So this is the specification and we use that for our storybook implementation.

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We have a slippers repo, where all the code is stored and tracked. So this is the implementation, and then this is what builds out our storybook instance, which is still under development.

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So this has enabled us to do a lot of work much faster than we would have. So we started with the home page and the enterprise page, applying our new design system to it looks great. If you look at the code there's a lot of you know uh shortcuts being made, but that's in the effort to get as many improvements live to our customers and potential customers as fast as possible, and we can iterate towards making it a more scalable code base, which we have done with the pricing page and continue to do so.

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We did about five mvcs, I believe, on the homepage and we'll continue to iterate on this. Now that we have it deployed in our design system. It makes it much more easy. It's scalable, it's modular.

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We can make changes much much much more quickly, seeing a lot of really good results from these improvements, the enterprise page we did as well, so we did an mvc to the home page, our second mvc. We were able to do to the home page in the enterprise page, in the same time that it took us to do the first home page mvc, because applying the system allowed us to make changes in much fewer places. That would then scale out and scaffold out to multiple parts of our experience.

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Hot off the press this week is the new pricing page. So this is amazing. This is the first page we built from top to bottom using our new design system. The code is much cleaner, it's not as much inline styles and we're going to be able to take all of the improvements we did here: roll them out on the homepage, enterprise page and all the pages forward. So a really nice example of iterating continually delivering and moving things forward.

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This was an amazing cross-functional effort not only from uh the visuals that we're seeing the code improvements, just the copy connecting with everyone that in product and infrastructure, and everything that had to make this huge large scale program happen, super fun, very proud of everyone that was involved, and just this week we applied the design system, a very quick nbc iteration to our free trial page. We didn't move anything around.

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Basically, we just used everything that was there and applied our design system, which is typography, spacing colors primary and secondary buttons, and already it's looking much cleaner. A lot easier to read process what I have to do as a potential customer and another benefit is the code's so much cleaner. So now, as we iterate forward, that's just going to happen so much faster, so some data so on the home page.

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What we're seeing is that customers are finding content more engaging. What's making us believe that is average time on page is up and bounce rate is down.

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So people come to the page, it's easier to consume, so they're reading, they're getting drawn in it's more sticky versus before, because of the what the improvements are telling us is, the content might have been hard to consume, confusing, maybe there's a bit too much of it all clustered together, so very, very promising, again small sample sizes here, but we're really excited about seeing green arrows pointing up it's never a bad thing.

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Pricing page. So I have a link here to shane rice's explainer of what you're seeing here. What we're seeing in a short story version is switching from four options to three is working. A lot more people are clicking on the options.

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The new choice architecture makes it easier to choose so really great to see this positive feedback in you know it's about a week's worth of data, so again very volatile, not something to to trust too much yet until we get to statistical significance, but always good. When you see the initial signal as positive there's, some additional technical benefits uh added a little tr tldr for the efforts of getting through this deck in a timely manner. So it's just it's much much more efficient and enjoyable to work on the marketing site.

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We're seeing a lot of performance increases second cms, so very exciting, so much work going on behind the scenes um for a lot of the quarter. That really came to a focal point, mid-december, where we were all of a sudden had the groundwork laid and we're just releasing new pages built on cms.

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So in q3 we set a task to define the cms collaboratively work with everybody who is going to be a stakeholder in identifying what would be our best solution going forward, a mantra kind of rose to the surface for us, which was content, creators or users too. So if it's easy and enjoyable for our content teams to make content, that's going to be felt by those who consume it, which is good for our brand.

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So in q3 we also ran that process to have identified the best option. So netlify cms was that I have a link to epic. If you want to um follow along and this quarter, we got into the iterative design process as well as laying down the technical foundation. So tina was working on the visual designs, collaborating really closely with our content teams, understanding their needs and lauren was doing all the work behind the scenes. Getting nitplify integrated into our code base.

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And the exciting thing is: it's running now be very careful because we're still fixing some things, but if you go to about.gitlab.com admin, you can actually log into our cms um very exciting, um just sharing because we're dangerous- and we want you to know about it, but we'll let you know and have training videos ready for when it's actually ready for mass consumption, but really cool. You can just log in there's a git lab authentication service that uses our current gitlab information over here on the top right.

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You can see the list of topics we have where we've pulled in the topics pages, we're going to move on to the blog pages very quickly, very, very exciting. um Here's an example of a topics, page the continuous integration and continuous delivery page. So we started with topics pages because there are fewer of them, the blog there's so much content. So by using a set of pages that have less variability just means we can have more confidence in what we're doing. There's. Also the topics pages have a little bit more of a similar.

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um You know content hierarchy, so that means that we could work really quick to. You know, move beyond just the simple text, editor and and test other interesting things like um here, as you can see like related content, and if you go to this page and scroll down um you'll see, we've got some modules where you can custom select an icon to go along with you know the information we're presenting so really awesome, very excited uh we coordinated within an epic, so we kind of realized.

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You know we could write a script to transfer everything over, but writing that script is going to take longer than actually just getting all hands on deck, with our digital experience, team and just rolling up our sleeves and transferring content, and because the template we made was flexible, we could do a mass migration and we moved over every single page like parent page in one sprint, so that's 10 pages so immediately, showing the benefit of using systems using content management systems and the design system and the side benefit was because we were doing all that work.

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We were getting familiar with the cms and you know: learning while delivering tangible progress.

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So yeah small sample size, um but we're seeing some really positive signal back of the work we're doing so. What we're looking here january, 4th to january 28th, just that ci cd page, that I was just sharing on the last slide. um You know we're seeing dramatic improvement in page load like 71, faster average time on page, has gone up, 76 so again, another indicator that this content is meaningful to people and it's presented in a way that is engaging and, let's say fun, page views are up. That's awesome.

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That's that's more related, probably to demand gen or push campaign type of stuff, but also because we're adding more um cross-linking I'd say that would mean that the work we're doing is also contributing to that 103 increase exit rate and bounce rate are down um fairly significantly. So a lot of people are finding the information and moving forward with it.

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So if you have any questions you can um pop into this agenda doc- and I really look forward to the conversation that we're going to create through this. Thank you.